Home > Environment, Science & Technology > Paleocene-Eocene tanning salon

Paleocene-Eocene tanning salon

March 9, 2006

One of the frequent criticisms leveled at scientific inquiry by the chronically over-religious alleges that science is an ‘orthodoxy’ from which dissidents are excommunicated.  But a single paragraph from a modest report on paleoclimatology in The Economist illustrates a concept for which that view fails to account.

At the AAAS meeting in St. Louis in February, paleoclimatologists presented evidence from the temperature spike known as the ‘paleocene-eocene thermal maximum,’ or PETM, that current greenhouse models may be too conservative by a wide margin.  In other words, it may get even hotter than we thought. 

But the paleoclimatologists weren’t all arm-in-arm singing ‘kum-by-ya’; they were trying to prove each other wrong.  This is the crucial difference from orthodoxy; scientists love to find holes in the current theory or in each others’ work.  The fact that they found the same hole while looking from different angles is how one field of science validates (or invalidates) another.  Some were using oxygen isotopic analysis, others patterns of animal migration based on the fossil record. 

That does not necessarily mean it is time to panic.  The models could be right after all, if the paleo-temperature estimates turn out to be wrong, (though the fact that multiple approaches undertaken by rival paleo-climatologists at different sites generally agree suggests they are not far off).

The key word is rival.  Ruthless competition in the marketplace of ideas has an effect similar to competition in our monetary economy – what remains may not be perfect, but it’s stood up to assaults that certify its strength.  Ideas which are sheltered under a conceptual monopoly like ‘revealed truth’ can’t be weeded out unless their challengers want to risk eternal damnation.

Oh, and that climate thingie?  The news from the PETM isn’t good:

On balance, it is probably too early to tell.  But that is hardly reassuring.  As Dr. Wing puts it: “This is probably the single scariest result of deep-time paleo-climate work.  The models we use to predict the future have been shown to be conservative, and we don’t know why.”
>>The Economist, 2/25/06, pg 82 A blast from the past

  1. March 9, 2006 at 17:10 | #1

    LOL DOF, the 1.5 persons post is beating out this one on paleoclimatology.  But anyways that is really interesting information.  I wonder if the weather we have been having lately is also an indicator.  Whether or not it is it still worries me.

    Check out the link below for a great laugh. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/11/24.html#a6042

  2. March 9, 2006 at 20:13 | #2

    Well the record number of comments I ever got was a post on tomatoes.  It’s apparently something people care about a lot.  If global warming turns out to be a danger to the tomato crop, maybe well see some action…

  3. March 10, 2006 at 09:03 | #3

    Holy crap, you mean global warmng just might be a natural cycle that the earth goes through. The mind boggles. I thought it was all the hot air from republicans and democrats lieing to and about each other. I guess i will die someday afer all.

  4. March 10, 2006 at 09:09 | #4

    I wish that were the case but you’ve got it just backwards.  The PETM provides actual data of how greenhouse gasses and global climate are related.  The gasses can come from volcanism or from buring fossil fuel, makes no difference. What the scientists are seeing is that due to some factor they don’t quite understand, the effect is bigger than their current models had predicted.  That is not good news to say the least.

  5. March 10, 2006 at 12:43 | #5

    The question being what we can or should be doing to forestall it, or to plan toward it.

    Regardless, my actual point was to your statement about criticisms of science by the religious zealots.  The problem is, of course, they try to have it both ways.  If a scientific theory is generally, even universally accepted, then we hear, “Science is a religion, taken on faith, where there is no dissent allowed.”  If a scientific theory is under attack within the scientific world, then it’s, “See, scientists admit they don’t know the truth, so our mental meanderings deserve as much credit as anyone else’s.”

    Feh.

Comments are closed.